Daniel Reich Gallery Temporary Space at the Hotel Chelsea 222 West 23rd Street, rm 227

Sean Raspet The Generations Hotel Chelsea March 7 - April 12, 2008 Daniel Reich Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Sean Raspet at the Hotel Chelsea entitled “The Generations:” a counterpoint to his present Daniel Reich Gallery exhibition, “The Ones We Work For.“ Inspired by Valerie Solanas’ 1968 S.C.U.M. Manifesto, “The Generations” is located in a tiny squatter type room at the Chelsea Hotel of the sort Solanas may have occupied during her residence there. Rather than examining Solanas’ biography, Raspet etches the veracity of Solanas’s vision using selected images. In keeping with Raspet’s interest in satire (Jonathan Swifts “A Modest Proposal” provided the title for his Frieze Art Fair installation), S.C.U.M. has been interpreted as biting social satire and a call for social change. As “The Ones We Work For” expresses a mechanical repetition of ideas within a dictatorship of large-scale images, “The Generations” expresses the repetition compulsion of the male as described by Solanas. Raspet’s title “The Generations” refers to narrative models like Turgenev’s Father’s and Sons in which social progress is propelled by the healthy resolution of the Oedipus conflict making history an implicitly male lexicon. In this scheme, Solanas pops up like an androgynous elf who turns everything upside down. Solanas’ manifesto is surprising in its reduction of men to porous corporal bodies (using a vocabulary reserved for women) and in Solanas’ assertion that the male is biologically deficient, a condition for which he anxiously atones by implementing as many oppressive social structures as possible. Raspet uses formulaic image types from the sectioned archive of the New York Public Library to confirm Solanas portrait of the conspiratorial male. As Solanas ascribes “war machines” to the male, Raspet clips images from the sketchbook of canonical Leonardo DaVinci who with a delicate hand carefully sketched brutal devices for carnage. As Solanas donned red lipstick to meet with her insolvent publisher Girodias and for her fateful encounter with Andy Warhol, graphic high-contrast Xeroxes of lipsticks resemble projectiles. The oddly shaped Pan American building appears as one of a number of impregnable corporate fortresses that marked the skyline of Solanas’ New York as she handed out mimeographed copies of S.C.U.M. on cold streets. As Solanas used the mimeograph, Raspet’s habitual use of the Xerox parallels this inexpensive method of generating literature intrinsic to sixties radicalism. Raspet’s installation is also informed by Klaus Theweleitıs “Male Fantasies” which (like Solanas’ consideration of the motivations for male violence) depicts the male soldier of fascist Germany as driven to conform by a latent terror of emasculation. As Raspet’s exhibition at Daniel Reich Gallery “The Ones We Work For” envisions a world where people serve monumental images, both exhibitions imagine a contemporary art world (like that Solanas may have seen in Warhol) where style, tidiness and presentation (inseparable from succinct advertising language) have become the criteria for worth. Raspet (agreeing with Solanas) suggests a world in which dream reality has been achieved: governed by evocative image systems. His use of found imagery linked by formal affinity is part parody of art’s hermetic isolation in an image world evocative (in terms of Solanas’ revolutionary aspirations) of Louis XIV’s Galerie des Glaces. Hence in “The Ones We Work For,” moralistic depictions of child laborers coexist glamorously with diamond studded luxury watches. As Solanas was frustrated by the ridicule with which Warhol’s circle may have responded to her class background, Raspet has conceptualized his art objects as expressive of “the voluptuous putrification of [consumer] desire,” and parodies art practice and theory as the province of the rich becoming ever less real and perhaps less significant as art-making shifts into a wholeheartedly reflective mode no longer attached to the subjects represented. For further information, please contact Daniel Reich Gallery at 212 924 4949. Daniel Reich Gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday from 11 - 6. Hotel Chelsea hours are to be announced.